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xiaolan: France won the World Cup

France won the World Cup

As Patrice Evra stormed from the training pitch and his teammates hid behind the curtains of their team bus, winning the World Cup seemed a very long way away. Any semblance of togetherness had evaporated – not for the first time. France have long been blessed with talent but rarely harmony, as shown by the debacle in South Africa in 2010. Didier Deschamps recognised this when he came into the job in 2012 and, throughout his six years in charge, he has placed the importance of squad harmony above nearly everything else. Anyone who threatens that unity is cast Chris Owings Youth jersey out immediately. France have won the World Cup because of their talent but also because Deschamps’ devotion to spirit has allowed their talent to flourish.
France’s trip to South Africa in 2010 was catastrophic. Florent Malouda was left out of the drab, goalless opener with Uruguay after he had squared up to the obdurate and often incomprehensible coach Raymond Domenech; the French Football Federation expelled Nicolas Anelka after he refused to apologise to his manager, having verbally abused him at half-time in the 2-0 defeat to Mexico; and hundreds of fans watched at an open training session as Evra came close to blows with fitness coach Robert Duverne and the squad refused to leave the bus in protest. It ended in farce, with Domenech bizarrely reading a statement from the players to the press outlining their fury at how Anelka had been treatment.
Domenech, already scheduled to move on after the tournament, left behind a fragmented and fractious group. The scandal transcended www.cardinalsofficialauthenticonlines.com/cardinals+budda+baker+jersey /a> football and became a national disgrace. When Laurent Blanc took charge post-South Africa, he dropped every member of that 23-man World Cup squad for his first game in charge, a 2-1 defeat in Norway, as a largely symbolic punishment.

Although France eventually qualified for Euro 2012 comfortably, French football’s self-destructive streak wasn’t far away. In a meeting with the FFF hierarchy in 2011, Blanc was surreptitiously recorded making comments that were interpreted as being somewhere between clumsy and racist. Blanc appeared to bemoan academies in France for focusing Lane Taylor Womens Jersey on young players with strength and www.chargersfootballofficialshop.com/Jahleel-Addae-Jersey.html /a> speed rather than technique and intelligence while asserting that these players tended to be black.

“They really train the same prototype of players: big, strong, powerful,” said Blanc. “What is there that is currently big, strong, powerful? The blacks. That’s the way it is. It’s a current fact. God knows that in the training centres and football schools there Brian Quick Youth jersey are loads of them.” The implication was that black players are supposedly physically superior but mentally inferior, although Blanc was “outraged” by that interpretation. Blanc’s comments fed into a political climate tinged by anti-immigration rhetoric and long-running issues of race surrounding the national side.

In contrast, the 1998 World Cup winners were seen as a unifying force in truly representing France’s broad ethnicity, a team that was often referred as “Black-Blanc-Beur” (Black-White-Arab). Didier Deschamps, the captain of the 1998 team, took over from Blanc after the team’s underwhelming exit from Euro 2012 at the quarter-finals. Central to his handling of the team has been maintaining unity and banishing any notion that the squad could become cliquey or divided. The continued exile of Karim Benzema is the most obvious example.

As a result, the atmosphere resembles that of a club. It is an almost clichéd aim for an international coach but one that few of them ever achieve. Deschamps’ ability to mould his squad socially as well as tactically into a tournament-winning side should not be undersold. The way Benjamin Mendy and his fellow substitutes poured on to the pitch and piled on to Kylian Mbappé as he finished a flowing counter-attacking move against Argentina showed the togetherness in the squad.